Your Job Is Protected When You Deploy. Enforcing That Protection Is Another Story.

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Three tours, Saudi Arabia, Guantánamo Bay, Poland. Captain Cody Khork of Lakeland, Florida, had learned to trust that federal law would hold his civilian life together while he was gone. When activation orders arrived for Operation Epic Fury on February 28, 2026, he had no reason to think this time would be different. The Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act, passed by Congress in 1994, guarantees exactly that: deployed service members keep their jobs, their seniority, their benefits. On paper, it is one of the strongest employment protections any American worker can get.

On March 1, a drone strike at the Port of Shuaiba in Kuwait killed Khork and five fellow soldiers from the 103rd Sustainment Command, U.S. Army Reserves, based in Des Moines. He was 35 years old. The other fallen included Sgt. 1st Class Noah Tietjens, 42, of Bellevue, Nebraska; Sgt. 1st Class Nicole Amor, 39, of White Bear Lake, Minnesota; and Sgt. Declan Coady, 20, of West Des Moines. For them, job protection became irrelevant in an instant.

Roughly 13,000 other National Guard and Army Reserve members are now in the Middle East as part of the same operation. For them, whether that legal protection functions is anything but abstract.

Operation Epic Fury: Scale and Deployment

U.S. Central Command announced on March 3 that more than 50,000 American troops and two aircraft carriers are engaged in joint U.S.-Israeli military operations against Iran. The 200 fighter jets cited in some accounts refer to Israeli Air Force aircraft in the February 28 operation — described as the largest flyover in Israeli Air Force history — not exclusively U.S. jets. Forces have struck nearly 2,000 targets since the campaign began February 28. Gen. Brad Cooper, CENTCOM commander, described it as the largest American military buildup in the Middle East in a generation.

Within that figure are thousands of citizen-soldiers whose civilian employers received official notice that their workers will be gone for weeks, months, or potentially longer. Those employers range from multinational corporations to small family businesses. They now face legal obligations they may not fully understand, enforced by a system that veterans’ legal advocates describe as consistently underpowered even in quiet times.

This deployment is a real-time stress test of whether America’s legal framework for large-scale mobilization works. The early evidence is not encouraging. (For background on how Guard and Reserve activations happen, our earlier guide to Guard and Reserve activation covers the mechanics in detail.)

What USERRA Guarantees

USERRA is genuinely unusual in the American employment law field. Unlike Title VII of the Civil Rights Act or the Americans with Disabilities Act, which apply only to employers with 15 or more employees, USERRA covers every employer, period: the Fortune 500 company and the three-person landscaping business alike. There is no statute of limitations, meaning a service member can file a claim years after the violation. Courts are told to interpret the law in favor of service members. If a violation is found to be willful, courts can award liquidated damages — under the 2025 Dole Act, the greater of $50,000 or lost wages and benefits plus prejudgment interest — plus attorney’s fees.

The law’s five core guarantees: the right to take military leave without penalty; the right to return to the same job or an equivalent one; protection from discrimination based on military status; continuation of health insurance and retirement benefits during the absence; and protection against retaliation for asserting any of these rights. Employers have active duties here, employers must do things, not just avoid doing harm. Benefits must be maintained. Time away counts toward seniority. A returning service member is entitled to the pay and position they would have reached had they never left.

If a service member would have received a promotion and a raise during a twelve-month deployment, they are entitled to that promotion and raise when they return. They are not simply owed their old job at their old salary. The law does not freeze the service member in place; it assumes they kept moving.

The problem is what happens when someone violates it.

The Enforcement Gap

When an employer fires a deployed service member, lets their health insurance lapse, or quietly eliminates their position while they’re overseas, the remedy is: file a complaint with the Department of Labor’s Veterans’ Employment and Training Service, then wait.

In fiscal year 2024, DOL VETS reviewed 1,204 new USERRA cases. The agency has 90 calendar days to finish each investigation, with extensions available only if the complainant agrees. Investigators must look at employment records, interview both parties, decide whether a violation occurred, and try to negotiate a settlement. If negotiation fails, the case gets referred to the Department of Justice (for private employers) or the Office of Special Counsel (for federal employers).

Since taking over enforcement in 2004, DOJ has filed 119 USERRA lawsuits. It has also favorably resolved 221 complaints through legal settlements, which are formal agreements to resolve violations without a full trial.

The U.S. Military has roughly 750,000 reserve and National Guard personnel. The current mobilization activates an estimated 13,000 of them at once, all for the same operation. If employers violate USERRA at even a modest rate, the resulting spike in complaints could exceed DOL VETS’ investigative capacity within weeks.

The Government Accountability Office has documented this structural problem in multiple audits. GAO has found that specific agencies given major compliance responsibilities during personnel surges — including USAID in 2003 and FEMA in later reviews — lacked plans or ways to track whether they had enough staff. DOL VETS is not exempt from this critique.

The following table shows the complaint volume DOL VETS has handled in recent years. These are baseline numbers, during relative peacetime, when Guard and Reserve activations were scattered and modest in scale.

Source: DOL VETS USERRA Annual Report to Congress, FY2024. *The FY2023 figure of 1,201 conflicts with the 981 reported in the DOL VETS FY2023 Annual Report; figures for FY2019–FY2022 could not be independently verified and should be cross-checked against each year’s official report. These figures reflect complaint volume during periods of limited Guard and Reserve activation. A mass mobilization of 13,000 service members represents a different situation from normal.

A surge in complaints from a single large deployment would not just slow the system. It would force a choice: run thorough investigations of fewer cases, run quick investigations of more cases, or let complaints pile up in a backlog. History suggests backlog is the most likely outcome. During the post-9/11 mobilizations, the National Guard Association of the United States and the Reserve Officers Association both documented instances where the complaint process broke down under volume pressure. The system eventually recovered. But it did not recover before individual service members’ careers and families were harmed.

Filing a Complaint From a Combat Zone

The law does not account for a specific practical problem: a deployed service member cannot easily use the complaint process.

The DOL complaint form, VETS-1010, can be filed online or by mail. But the investigative process requires timely communication, document submission, and follow-up.

DOL’s own internal rules for investigators acknowledge that investigators face the challenge of running thorough investigations of complex employment matters. Those investigations may span multiple employers and multiple states, often with incomplete documentation. That challenge is compounded when the complainant is unreachable.

The law assumes the person whose rights were violated can spend time gathering documents, communicating with investigators, and working with an attorney while also serving in a combat zone. That assumption is not realistic. The service members most likely to need enforcement are the ones least able to pursue it.

USERRA Remedies Are Real but Arrive Late

Step one: the service member files a complaint with DOL VETS, weeks one through four. Step two: DOL investigates, weeks four through sixteen. Step three: if no resolution, DOL refers to DOJ, weeks sixteen through twenty. Step four: DOJ decides whether to litigate, weeks twenty through twenty-six or beyond. Step five: if DOJ declines, the service member can sue on their own in federal court, which can take years.

Only at the end of that process can a court order reinstatement. By then, the service member has been unemployed for months or years, their family’s health insurance has lapsed, their retirement savings have been disrupted, and they have spent considerable mental and emotional energy fighting a legal battle while serving in a combat zone.

The employer can be ordered to pay: back wages, lost benefits, liquidated damages — under the 2025 Dole Act, the greater of $50,000 or lost wages and benefits plus prejudgment interest — and the service member’s legal fees. No criminal prosecution. No jail time. The only financial penalty is civil. A small employer who accidentally fails to maintain a service member’s health insurance faces the same enforcement pathway as a large employer that deliberately eliminated a position. The small employer may escape the doubled-penalty provision if the violation can be shown to be accidental.

This creates what advocates describe as a sharp imbalance. A service member who fails to report for duty may face court-martial and imprisonment under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a criminal framework; dishonorable discharge is not an automatic consequence and depends on the severity and duration of the offense — short-term AWOL may result only in confinement and pay forfeiture. An employer who violates USERRA faces a civil process that may not produce real consequences if they can afford to defend themselves. The comparison, while striking, reflects a structural difference between criminal and civil law that Congress has applied consistently across all employment statutes, not just USERRA. The ADA, Title VII, and the FMLA all rely on both administrative enforcement (through the EEOC and DOL) and civil litigation — not civil enforcement alone. Making employment law violations criminal raises serious questions about due process, the intent standards required for criminal liability, and potential chilling effects on hiring. Most major employment laws in the United States do not carry criminal penalties for employer violations, though at least one significant exception exists: the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) carries criminal penalties including up to 6 months imprisonment for pattern-or-practice violations and up to 5 years for document fraud. The more direct question is whether the civil penalty structure, back pay, benefits, liquidated damages, and attorney’s fees, creates enough deterrence. The penalties aren’t strong enough to stop employers from breaking the law, whether that’s intentional or an oversight. Congress has amended USERRA’s penalty structure multiple times since 1994, most significantly in 2022 and 2025; the 2025 Dole Act introduced mandatory attorney fees and minimum liquidated damages of $50,000 for willful violations. No legislative record documents a deliberate choice to keep civil penalties as the sole enforcement mechanism. Whether that reflects a considered policy judgment, competing legislative priorities, or simple institutional inertia is not established by the available record.

The Small Employer Compliance Gap

The enforcement gap falls disproportionately on small employers.

Guard and Reserve members work across the economic spectrum, but a large portion work for employers without dedicated HR staff. When a deployment order arrives at a 20-person company, the employer faces immediate pressure: covering the absent worker’s duties, managing payroll and benefits continuation, sorting out tax and retirement plan implications. It involves specific, ongoing requirements that are easy to get wrong. Small businesses already face a growing pile of employment rules they have to follow. USERRA adds a layer that requires active management over months or years.

A small employer who accidentally fails to maintain a service member’s health insurance because payroll systems were not updated faces the same legal exposure as a large employer that deliberately violated the law.

Advocates have raised concern that this dynamic could create a backwards result the law didn’t intend. A small employer who cannot afford to defend against a USERRA claim may simply avoid hiring Guard and Reserve members in the first place. That is itself a USERRA violation, but nearly impossible to detect. Whether this occurs at meaningful scale is not well documented; survey data on whether small employers make hiring decisions based on USERRA liability exposure is limited. ESGR and GAO have not published studies measuring this effect, and the hypothesis, while plausible, should be understood as such rather than as an established finding.

Many violations are accidental, resulting from poor training or unclear guidance rather than deliberate non-compliance. Employers have an active obligation to train managers and maintain compliant policies. But it does explain why compliance failures tend to cluster at smaller employers in a mass mobilization. Those employers often lack the resources to manage extended absences correctly.

The War Powers Question Has Downstream Consequences

A constitutional question runs beneath all of this: does Operation Epic Fury have proper congressional authorization?

The War Powers Resolution, passed in 1973, requires the president to notify Congress within 48 hours of introducing U.S. Forces into hostilities. A 60-day clock then begins. If Congress does not authorize the action within that window, troops must be withdrawn, with an additional 30-day wind-down period allowed. The operation began February 28, 2026. The 60-day window expires around April 28.

The Senate voted 47-53 against a war powers resolution seeking to stop the use of military force in Iran without congressional authorization. Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman broke ranks with Democrats to oppose the measure, while Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky voted in support. The House was expected to vote on a similar resolution. Neither measure was likely to pass. Even if they did, a presidential veto would require a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override.

The Trump administration’s legal rationale has centered on the argument that the operation either does not trigger the full 60-day clock or is authorized by prior congressional authorizations to use military force, broad legal permissions passed after earlier conflicts like 9/11. That position has a long legal history. Every president since Richard Nixon has disputed the War Powers Resolution’s constitutionality as applied to the commander-in-chief’s Article II authority. Federal courts have consistently refused to rule on the question on standing and political question grounds. This has left the executive branch’s interpretation effectively unchallenged in court. Defenders of the administration’s position, including scholars such as John Yoo of UC Berkeley — whose general legal positions on broad presidential war powers and the 2001 AUMF are well-documented, though no evidence confirms he has specifically argued these authorities justify the 2026 Iran operations — argue that the 2001 AUMF’s authorization to use force against those involved in the September 11 attacks, combined with Article II authority, provides sufficient legal basis for sustained operations; subsequent administrations have controversially expanded the AUMF’s application to groups not involved in 9/11, which remains legally contested. Critics, including scholars such as Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School — whose general skepticism of broad AUMF interpretations is well-documented, though no evidence confirms he has specifically argued the 2001 AUMF’s connection to the 2026 Iran operations is legally weak — and former officials from both parties, counter that the 2001 AUMF’s connection to Iran is legally weak. They also argue that the scale of the current operation — more than 50,000 American troops, two aircraft carriers, strikes on nearly 2,000 targets, and aircraft including Israeli Air Force jets described as the largest flyover in Israeli Air Force history — makes it hard to characterize as anything other than “hostilities” under the plain meaning of the War Powers Resolution. That conclusion holds regardless of how prior administrations have read executive authority in smaller engagements.

If a court were to find that the deployment lacks proper congressional authorization, some service members might argue their USERRA protections do not legally apply. The answer is unclear. More immediately, some employers may raise the constitutional uncertainty as a reason to delay compliance. Others may argue that USERRA protections are somehow suspended during operations lacking proper authorization. The law does not support that position. But the argument may be raised, making it harder for service members to enforce their rights in court. Our earlier reporting on the legal ambiguity surrounding U.S. Military missions without clear congressional authorization covers how this uncertainty plays out in practice.

A service member cannot simply refuse deployment on constitutional grounds while keeping their USERRA protections. Serve first, litigate later, if they survive, and if they can handle the enforcement system. The law was not designed for the possibility that the deployment authority itself might be contested.

What Past Mobilizations and Recent Cases Tell Us

The current deployment is not the first time the military has conducted large-scale Guard and Reserve mobilizations since USERRA’s enactment. The post-9/11 period activated hundreds of thousands of Guard and Reserve members over two decades. That record gives a useful, if incomplete, guide to what happens when the enforcement system faces sustained pressure.

The Reserve Officers Association documented a 2025 settlement in which Southwest Airlines agreed to pay $18.5 million to resolve a class action filed by lead plaintiff and reservist pilot Jayson Huntsman, with ROA support, alleging that Southwest systematically denied airline pilot reservists paid military leave. The violations had continued for years before being detected and remedied. Southwest is not a small employer without HR staff. It is a major corporation with legal resources. It still engaged in systematic USERRA violations that took years of litigation to resolve.

That settlement was reached decades after USERRA’s enactment and years after the post-9/11 mobilizations. Enforcement failures are not just a surge problem — they are a built-in feature of a system that only acts when someone files a complaint, lacks enough staff to handle many at once, and relies on civil-only penalties. The current deployment may overwhelm the system in ways the post-9/11 mobilizations did not — it is a single, concentrated operation rather than a series of deployments spread over two decades.

The National Veterans Legal Services Program has recovered more than $5.6 billion in disability, death, and medical benefits for veterans through litigation and administrative advocacy, according to NVLSP’s June 2025 press release; the organization’s website currently cites a higher $7.2 billion figure, reflecting either a recent update or a different accounting methodology. It has also documented consistent gaps in the enforcement process. “No one should lose access to medical retirement protections through an unlawful procedural shortcut,” said Esther Leibfarth, Senior Managing Attorney at NVLSP, in a statement about an Air Force case where service members were denied access to the military’s disability evaluation system. A “procedural shortcut” means the Air Force skipped required steps in the process, cutting off service members’ rights without going through proper channels. The enforcement system’s core weakness is that it requires individual service members to fight for rights that should be automatic.

What Happens Next and What Would Help

Deployment orders are landing on employers’ desks. Troops are in the Middle East. The 60-day War Powers clock is running. Employers are scrambling to understand their obligations while the people those obligations protect are cut off from their civilian lives and any ability to monitor what is happening to their jobs.

The most likely outcome is pockets of excellent compliance, pockets of serious violations, and a large middle ground of accidental mistakes and partial non-compliance. The enforcement system will struggle to keep pace. Backlogs will develop. Individual service members’ fates will depend on whether they have access to legal resources, whether they can pursue claims while deployed or during recovery, and whether they have the persistence to handle a system designed for steadier complaint flows.

What would help: more investigators at DOL VETS funded for surge capacity; clear protocols for mass mobilization complaint volumes; outreach from ESGR to employers before violations occur rather than after; and stronger penalties that create real deterrence rather than a slow civil process many employers can outlast. Congress has the authority to address all of these. It has not.

The question is whether the enforcement infrastructure can deliver on it when tens of thousands of service members deploy at once to a major combat operation. The evidence from prior mobilizations is mixed. The system has produced real recoveries. The $18.5 million Southwest Airlines settlement and more than $5.6 billion in benefits recovered by NVLSP show that the enforcement mechanisms, when fully engaged, can produce significant results. At the same time, those outcomes required years of litigation and substantial legal resources that many individual service members cannot access on their own. Outcomes in the coming months will vary considerably depending on employer size, the nature of any violations, service members’ access to legal assistance, and the complaint volume DOL VETS must absorb. The structural gaps documented here, investigative capacity, the practical barriers to filing while deployed, and the delayed arrival of remedies, are real. They do not prevent meaningful enforcement. What they do is make enforcement uneven, and unevenness in a system designed to protect those serving in uniform is itself a policy problem worth Congress’s attention.

For service members handling these protections, our guide to balancing military service with civilian careers covers the practical steps for asserting USERRA rights, including how to document your employment status before deployment and what to do if your employer fails to comply upon your return.

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